Intro
Hey fellow developers!
This is a topic i always wanted to talk about (and im sure also some of you too), but i was somewhat of reserved about it because of the potential reactions. Please read it thoughtfully.
AI for good
In the first year of the drop of ChatGPT, i was flabbergasted how incredibly advanced our technology has got and how powerful it was. I almost used it every day (still to this day, but not particularly for coding). It helped me a lot by teaching me how to code, and how to apply insights i learned. Especially since a 10 month firmware developer job was waiting for me after my apprenticeship.
The decline
After 2 years, I didn’t see a reason to code as much anymore since ChatGPT was doing much of the work for me. Of course, i always made some adjustment or wrote some snippets by myself, but coding didn't feel the same anymore, since i could always ask ChatGPT for the right and working answer. This began really to hit, when i noticed that every day, everything started to slightly sound not authentic anymore. GitHub repos with questionable comments which no person would ever write, coding styles which seemed a little off, logic which quite didnt make sense. It felt like the personal touch was disappearing.
dev.to
I joined dev.to in 2022. ChatGPT/AI was very new for this time and not a lot of people knew what it really was. For me, this was the golden times on dev.to. Everyone wrote about their insights on new things they learned, authentic opinions, authentic posts, authentic comments, and the list goes on.
Sadly, this spirit of authenticity started to fade proportionally to the growth of ChatGPT. The Dead Internet Theory really began to grow on me with all the inauthentic content that was pushed on blogsites (not only dev.to). Every second post was/is like "top 10 git commands" or "portfolio page with x and y" or "top open source tools" or "xyz for beginners". Don't get me wrong, even i wrote a post similar to these categories (Optimize Embedded Development: Must-Have VSCode Extensions). But the dev.to homepage just started to be posts on these categories, which started to become uninteresting, If i compare it with the posts that were on the homepage in 2022. The real life insights are just missing.
Conlusion / Your opinion
ChatGPT/AI really pushed the speed of the development of new technology, while also making our content inauthentic ad unoriginal, since we don't have to think hard anymore. This whole AI thing has gotten out of control in my honest opinion, and it won't slow down from here on.
I'd love to hear your opinions about this topic below in the comments. Do you support my statements, are ou against them, or what do ou think in general? Let me know!
Remain authentic!
Regards
Top comments (4)
I've been waiting for someone to address this. My problem is that I haven't written many articles, but now I don't want to write anymore because I feel like everyone will assume I'm using AI in my work. It makes me feel like there's no value left in what I'm doing. Another issue is the attention span of readers. I don't want to write short, quick-read articles, I prefer writing longer, more informative ones. However, people today don't seem to read that type of content. Writing articles has become boring for me, and I feel like I'm gaining no value from it anymore.
Hey Osama, yes i agree with you 100%. Since the worls got so fast paced with Tiktok, shortfirm Content, etc... People cannot focus anymore and long articles are bleeding because of this. But i still have the motivation/need to write articles, since i still have the drive for it. And i go for it, even with the knowledge that not a lot of people wil read it. But i am sure that the people that will read the articles, are going to appreciate it. That's why i still see hope.
Regards
Dario
Thank you, Your perspective gives me a bit of hope, I guess I need to shift my mindset and focus more on the value I’m providing to the few who care, I wish you the best of luck with your writing journey ❤️
That's absolutely what's happened, and it's still happening today. If you're looking for alternatives, Daily.dev is a bit better (mainly because of better customization for your own feed), but their problem is organizations posting slop/completely unrelated content. For instance, here's my customized feed:
2 posts on... e waste, 3 posts by organizations that, in my opinion, provide a lot of filler content, and not a lot of actual perspective, 1 podcast clip (because software developers do podcasts now, apparently), and 2 posts by people that actually put a lot of time and thought into what they were writing. Feels oddly similar to Dev.to, but different in a few subtle ways.
That, and also an AI generated summary of every article. Yay.
If you don't mind me being the shameless plug, I've been working on a platform that intends to help solve a lot of these issues: byeAI. Very similar set up to Dev.to and Daily.dev, but we don't allow AI generated/assisted content, and we don't allow organizations to make posts.
All that being said, it's definitely possible to find quality content on Dev.to. It just takes more work than it should.